Submitted by dkuhlman on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 11:41
I'm trying to change a users password in Virtualmin. It sits there and does nothing for 5 minutes, then I get the error:
Error
Failed to lock file /etc/passwd after 5 minutes
Status:
Active
Comments
Submitted by andreychek on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 11:45 Comment #1
If you run "ls -a /etc/*.lock", do you see any results?
Submitted by dkuhlman on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 11:53 Comment #2
I tried to delete passwd.lock and 3 other .lock files in /etc but that didn't resolve the problem
http://osdir.com/ml/web.webmin.general/2003-04/msg00283.html
Submitted by dkuhlman on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 11:56 Comment #3
after making the above changes I get a different error:
Error
Failed to lock file /etc/security/limits.conf after 5 minutes
Submitted by sgrayban on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 12:08 Comment #4
Please closed --> see https://www.virtualmin.com/node/15729
Submitted by andreychek on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 12:08 Comment #5
Did you by chance perform any updates on your server recently? Do you recall what packages were updated?
You can determine what all dpkg installed by looking in /var/log/dpkg.log.
Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 12:12 Comment #6
Those locking failures can happen if a .lock file exists, but is empty. Normally they contain a process ID, which Webmin uses to check if the original locker is still running .. but an empty .lock file cannot be validated in this way. Some other programs like
vipwcreate an empty/etc/passwd.lockfile.What is the contents of these
.lockfiles? If it is a PID, what is the command line of that process?